RAID

RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.